The Acreage

This story happened at my ex husband’s mother’s old house. They lived on an acreage just outside Calgary, AB, Canada in a huge, beautiful house with a big, but dark basement. When my son was a baby, we lived in the house in the basement for roughly 8 months. There was a living room with an alcove off to the side with an open arch instead of a doorway and that’s where our bed was located. Weird things would happen like you’d be sitting upstairs and you’d hear the carpeted stairs creaking like someone was walking up them towards you, but when you looked, there’d be nothing there. There was a mirrored two door closet at the bottom of the stairs that I hated and creeped me out. All the mirrors downstairs did. My husband’s brother and mother both felt the place was haunted, too.

I had a terrible time sleeping there. My son had a lot of toys that made noise including a Sleep n Snore Ernie doll that would make noise when you moved it. Ernie would say “I feel great!” when you sat him up. For some reason I always preferred to sleep on the couch in front of the tv instead of the bed. But as soon as I’d start drifting off, one of the toys would make noise. I was starting to fall asleep late one night and I heard, “I feel great!” and I thought, “It’s just the toys settling in the playpen”. As soon as I thought that, Ernie said “I feel great! I feel great! I feel great!“ three times really fast. I put that thing out in the garage, but other toys would make noise after that. It felt like whatever it was, it didn’t like me and got a big kick out of freaking me out and tried to keep me from sleeping. I was glad when we moved out of there.

Fast forward about nine years when the subject of ghosts came up between my son and I. He asked me if I ever felt any place was haunted. By this time, his grandma had sold the house and neither of us ever had to go back, so I said, "I think your grandma’s old house was haunted." My son said he hated the basement. I said I did, too and told him a little bit about the toys making noise and how I had a hard time sleeping there. After the divorce, when my son used to visit his grandma, he would sleep in the basement living room on the pullout couch. He said one morning he was watching tv and out of the corner of his eye in his peripheral vision, he saw a tall, thin woman with long black hair, wearing a long, black dress peek out from around the corner at him from the alcove where our bed used to be years before. When he turned his head to look in that direction, nothing was there. Another morning, his grandma yelled down that breakfast was ready and as he was walking down the hallway from the basement living room towards the stairs and the mirrored closet, he looked up and saw the same woman who had peeked out at him, walking behind him in the mirror. He took off and booked it up the stairs, totally frightened.

He mentioned having a really bad nightmare about dead deer in the water near the property. The house was only part way up the hill and there was a heavily wooded area on a hill behind the house, but nobody had ever explored it. That triggered a memory for me because when I did manage to get a little sleep there, I would have the most vivid and terrifying nightmares. So much so, that I started keeping a dream diary, they were so detailed. I would wake up terrified and start writing and have four pages of a very detailed nightmare, then would realize I had only been asleep for two hours or so. Strangely, as big and beautiful as the house was and in Calgary when the market was hot, the house was on the market for almost a year when my mother in law had gotten a very good deal on it. When she put it back on the market, it sat again for almost a year before someone bought it.

FuckYeahNightmares Mod James: 7/10 Oohh that part about the mirror was really really spooky! I probably mentioned this before but mirror’s get me the most. Thanks for sharing the scares!